Silicon Insider: Climbing Mount E-mail
Sept. 3 -- Spam, spam, spam, spam, scams and spam …
A month into my African safari this summer I had a chance to sit down at a computer and log onto my e-mail. My fingers hovered for a moment over the keys. I had a premonition of something terrible about to happen.
It wasn't that many years ago, I remember, that I would plan my vacation days around trips to the computer. It was my umbilical to the world, and I didn't want my e-mail even to age for an hour before I got my hands on it and punched out a quick reply.
This trip I didn't even take along my laptop. In Zambia I even passed up on a chance to stop at an Internet café — not far from a fish market with the appealing ad painted on its walls "Guaranteed no Flies" — for fear that it would dampen my visit to Victoria Falls.
Remember when computers were fun? Remember the thrill of hearing "You've got mail?" Exactly when did this become drudgery? And precisely when did reading e-mail become a nightmare?
Staring Up at Mountains of E-mail
Looking back, I think I can say that I started hating e-mail the day the spam exceeded the legitimate messages. And I began hiding from my computer somewhere along that dark interval between the dot.com crash and Sept. 11. These days, the only news is bad, so what's the point of looking at headlines 14 times each day?
But now I found myself 10,000 miles from home. Surely that was a safe enough distance to re-approach the Web with an open mind, even with a little hope of a world grown kinder and more courteous in my absence.
So, as the roosters crowed nearby and the jackals howled in the distance, I jumped from the Kalahari into Cyberspace.
I logged on through an African ISP, its colorful home page reporting the news while somehow ignoring an entire continent full of slavery, mass murder, disease and famine. Then, on to my e-mail provider (whose name you don't need to know).
I had mail. God Almighty I had mail. I had — and the precision of the number was like a cosmic joke — exactly 1,000 e-mails.
There is something about 1,000 unanswered e-mails that makes you sit up straight even as your jaw drops. This is the Everest of e-mails. It is Kilo-mail. Just scrolling through it takes several minutes — especially on the 22K baud speed I was poking along at. Reading just the titles takes a half-hour.
Still, there's no choice: after all, buried somewhere in that mountain may be that one crucial missive that changes your life. And so, even as the kudu cooked on the barbecue and my children played with the farm dogs outside, I set to work deleting my way through the mountain.
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